


Sad in the fruit, bright in the flower

by gogollescent



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-27
Updated: 2015-07-27
Packaged: 2018-04-11 10:52:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4432751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Galadriel and Nerdanel talk wanderlust. Incompetently.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sad in the fruit, bright in the flower

The temporary market under Tirion’s eastern ramparts was not Nerwen’s idea of a holiday. Magpie dickering she left to her eldest brother, and the wares (she thought) were lovelier alone than in bright heaps. But today crowd and clamor seemed to pen a kind of garden, planted thick along the muddy path; and merchant-trees put out unseasonable flowers of silk or clay. She lost herself with pleasure between stalls.

“Artanis,” called a woman’s voice behind her, deep and strained.

Nerwen turned on her heel. 

“I thought it was you,” said Nerdanel. She flashed a smile like a cat’s blithe lunge. “Surely not, I thought—but then who else, with that hair?”

The fragmentary back-and-forth was typical of her aunt. When distracted, Nerdanel spoke in friezes: jumping like a tired eye between stone bands of story. She talked impatiently to _herself,_ as though trained to expect she’d not listen.

Nevertheless, the crowd had begun to crest on their minor conversational reef. They ducked together into a jeweler’s booth—Nerwen was still so taken aback that it was all she could do to mirror Nerdanel’s heavy grace on entering.

 _Surely not._ “Am I that rare a sight here?” she asked, hiding her dismay. It was true, of course, but it disturbed her to think Nerdanel knew it. She hoped for another explanation: perhaps that one of her parents was expecting her on the opposite side of the city. Or…

“Oh, yes,” said Nerdanel. “Arafinwë’s daughter, beacon of marathons! I don’t believe we’ve ever met indoors.”

The compliment, delivered in expert mimicry of Tirion’s most strident race caller, made Nerwen’s calves itch. She took a few steps sideways, and directed a contrite half-smile at the jeweler, who sat alert and petrified at the sudden appearance of two great ladies of the Noldor under his awning. “This isn’t exactly a parlor.”

“So your streak goes unbroken. Still.” Nerdanel raked her over with a quick, nearly tactile glance, as though picking up and turning over a clutch of elementary geometric forms. Destroying at a sweep the illusion that Nerwen was one whole. “Scouting for a gift, are you? Let’s see, can I guess who?”

“I doubt it.” She pretended to pour out a string of carnelian beads into one hand. The jeweler jumped up and made to help her with the catch. She let him settle the strand on her shoulders, but shrugged him off when he tried to lift clear her hair.

“Elusive in thought as in deed!” said Nerdanel, which was probably a quote. She retreated a little toward the mouth of the tent while speaking. Outside, the crush had thinned; you might glimpse rills of alabaster between queueing pedestrians, in a dizzy, changing prospect. The immortal stonework of Tirion—a rapid churned by children’s shadows.

“Thank you,” Nerwen said to the jeweler. She hooked the necklace back on its stand. “You can’t call _me_ elusive,” she told Nerdanel, briskly. “Or claustrophobic. Father always says that when he was a boy you and Fëanáro spent more time traipsing through Araman than here.”

“Well, I trust Arafinwë’s math,” said Nerdanel, apparently without sarcasm. “Though we tried to skirt the tundras, as a rule.” An idea seemed to touch her. “Would you like a look at our old maps, sometime? Not accomplished pieces, but if you have any interest in making the trek yourself…”

“Not—to Araman?”

Nerdanel shrugged about half as self-consciously as, in Nerwen’s estimation, she should have done. “If you want to try yourself on unsettled land, it has to be north. Round the Bay you can’t go forty miles without striking a homestead.”

Baffled, Nerwen thought several things at once. One was that Nerdanel had seriously misapprehended the character of her restlessness. The desolate north could never attract her for the very reason Nerdanel prescribed it—and, yes, perhaps that was conceit on her part: a thirst for audience. But if she valued her body for its power to stir others, was she ungenerous? Was she dull? Her fear offered additional reasons. The empty world might be vast and nourishing—but to hunt it alone was to risk a failed shot, and then wonder itself would be her crippled uncaught prey. Wonder fleeing, at the drum of her footfalls, to die apart and little-used; while she sat on some barren ridge and let discomfort snuff the blue flame of the view.

Far better to share in the conspiracy of athletic contests, which set a price on trivia, and dispatched a thousand archers after every minor joy. It was wasteful, no doubt, but with so many joining… They had darts enough to bring down the smallest bird.

The other thought was that Nerdanel was either remarkably oblivious or remarkably bold, to suggest outright that one of Indis’s grandchildren remove herself from the city, for who knew how long. It embarrassed her to see the problem when Nerdanel did not. If she did not. Nerdanel was many times her age, mother to Fëanáro’s heirs; she had no business forgetting that she could not make such presents.

So Nerwen muttered something about kindness in excess.

The jeweler, hovering, took advantage of the apparent lull to assail Nerdanel with suggestions. Perhaps this cowry-shell cameo, perhaps that bracelet of agates? Nerdanel pointed, seemingly at random, to a silver seabird on an unadorned chain.

“My sister’s work, not mine,” said the jeweler, doubtfully; but he accepted coin for it. Nerwen noted with some amusement that Nerdanel had given offense where she intended to mollify.

“Now, if you’ll excuse us, please,” said Nerdanel, over the man’s rote compliments. “I’ve remembered what it was I came in for.” 

She stuck her hand between the flaps of the tent-corner to undo the tie. She worked very quickly with only what knowledge touch could supply. The jeweler seemed more startled than acquiescent; but Nerdanel raised the back of the tent in a curtained salute, and gestured amiably for Nerwen to pass through.

*

The alley behind the stall disgorged them both onto a silent courtyard. The sole ornament, if such it could be called, was a foursquare of mallorn trees, overlooking a leaf-studded pond.

“Maps are the least of it, of course,” Nerdanel said, “and if I gave you ours I’d be expecting you to amend them on the fly—it would really be a favor from you to me, more than anything. As I recall we left great swathes of territory labelled only ‘Tall’ or ‘delirium.’ But I can also give you some general notes about the terrain, and if they fit, I’d be happy to donate equipment… You’ve never been really cold. It’s an astonishing sensation.”

They had passed the trees before she stopped talking. On the other side it was as though they had entered some great chamber; the ground was paved, and skin-thin pools of rain lay like silk throws. Nerwen had disliked the moth-eaten blackness of the pond, but she wondered that no one took advantage of the quadrangle beyond it, pale and blue-brushed, canted long by Laurelin’s waning.

“It sounds edifying,” she lied.

“It is! It is exactly that.”

A beat.

Nerdanel was beautiful, Nerwen thought critically; opening herself to the concept as though it were a foreign fruit. She touched it, smelt its skin—the theory’s skin, that was, its detachable sweetness; _not_ Nerdanel’s—and feeling drolly brave, swallowed it whole.

At sixty she liked nothing more than to be shocked by her thoughts’ convolutions. She was too young to realize that a rush of sentimental interest proved how much she had not known. A squall had eeled in through the Calacirya half an hour earlier, and Nerdanel’s wet hair had shards in it of gleaming copper; Nerdanel’s brown face caught light as a sail catches wind, being turned and structured by its take from the sky. There was no reason to stumble on the raised edge of her loveliness. She had married Fëanáro, after all. And yet, to see her here, thus happy and alone—

She sat down on the dry corner of a bench to avoid Nerdanel’s eyes. "Why don’t you go any longer?” she asked, beginning to plait her own loose tresses, which had endured no dampening worse than what droplets rolled off her spelled mantle. “North. Or wherever. You can’t tell me you’re more comfortable than I am in that throng. If you were, you wouldn’t have shown me this.”

“Wouldn’t I?”

“No.”

“Infants make travel somewhat impracticable,” said Nerdanel, almost shyly. She balanced a hand on her stomach.

It was oddly like being pushed. Little enough, but some membrane broke. By rights it should have been the point at which Nerwen surfaced into a clearer, unexceptional medium: the air above, where Fëanáro continued his ridiculous quest to secure the succession through force of numbers, and Nerwen stopped making small talk with the woman who couldn't resist him. Instead she had tipped underwater. The grey sky darkened; movement became sky-bright. Her fingers stopped at their work and reasserted themselves with deliberate force. She finished the braid and wound it twice around her head.

Nerdanel gave her a strange look. Nerwen ignored her, and pinned up the crown.

“Congratulations,” she said, turning so that she was looking up at Nerdanel, and Nerdanel was looking down. “I hadn’t heard the first thing about it, you’re keeping the secret well. Especially with five likely young leaks in your household. How do I look?”

“Sportsmanlike,” said Nerdanel. “And thank you. There’s been no occasion for an official announcement, but in another month—”

“Gates of Summer. Right.”

She began to think of ways to excuse herself. It was hard to say how she had gotten here: dragged along by pleasantries, scraped hide-thin by momentum. All the energy she had won at the fair had drained away. If they had been closer, friends of any kind, or even formal counterweights in the frozen balance of the city, she might have supposed that Nerdanel’s purpose all along had been this admission. But Nerdanel was only honest. Nerdanel let slip without lenience, lacking a guard or a gate.

Nor had they been, at any point, alone. Nerwen glanced again at the shape of Nerdanel's stomach.

“In truth,” said Nerdanel, “it’s not a sacrifice. I enjoyed those trips. But in my old age—” a charming, undeniably girlish twitch of the nose “—I find that domesticity also contains some hinterlands.” She waved a hand at the blind wall facing them. It occurred to Nerwen that nowhere in the square had she seen evidence of use; few of Tirion’s numberless fountains and baths went unattended long enough to collect so much as a reflection, and here the leaves lay thick over the dark. There were no sculptures, no modern amenities. The bench was hewn with what she had taken for contrarian austerity, and which might in fact have been—contrarian austerity, but from a much _earlier stage_ of internecine artistic struggle.

She almost asked how Nerdanel had found it. How she had guessed it, rather: that there must be trapped air in this provident city. In its windings toward perfection, it left a secret track.

“You have doubts,” Nerdanel said, misinterpreting her expression. She had taken the seabird necklace out of her shirt; now she whirled it like a slingshot. “Justly so. I would never have believed it without wandering the known world first. Had to work myself up to the change in scope, and then how clever I felt…! I really think, Artanis, that if you’re at all moved—”

“Thank you,” she said, shaking her head. “But it’s quite impossible. I have a duty to my family.”

The seabird decelerated, and snapped up against Nerdanel’s knuckles. She did not, as Nerwen had half-looked for, seem abashed.

“To your family,” she mused, almost with hesitation. “I have heard that phrase too often these few years. Ever since—” Doubt thumbed through her features, bent back a blank page; but the question eluded her, she released it with a sigh. “It hardly matters when it began. I had a hand in it myself, I’m sure.

“But I don’t understand what you mean by it. Any of you, Nerwen, not your cousins nor my children, when they profess true loyalty. I was a dutiful daughter, once; duty required that I bring back shapes from the far side of the continent. Duty required me to be lucky. But is this Cuiviénen? Must we live by water, or disappear?”

Her tone had sharpened. Small surprise, since the words were a grindstone. Nerwen watched her aunt fumble with the trinket in her hand and considered that only an artist of Nerdanel’s sort, overindulged and nervy, would treat with family feeling as barbarism in the dark. She didn’t understand? But she lived hand in hand with the saying's inventor. How often had her husband explained that what he did, he did for the King?

And yet it was worse than that, because Nerdanel wore a frown that said she thought Nerwen was the fool.

“Forgive me,” Nerwen said, crafting a smile which she made rueful to hide the fact that it was closed. “I've overstated my position.”

It relieved her to see her noble aunt draw back at last. “ _You_ haven’t. I’m being absurd.”

What answer here? Turukáno, at a party, Olwë's welcoming feast, had once told her the easiest thing was to be cruel to those who were used to it. Never mind how much thinking goodwill you bore them; the rut made by foul play would draw you in. Unless you were careful. Unless you worked hard. Whatever her aunt’s struggles—whatever pressures now drove her to seek solitude, not through flight, but by sending near relations to ice caps while she huddled safe at home— _what was it,_ what was it, what was it? What lamed a woman? Nerwen would not add to them. She held Nerdanel’s gaze, direct and warm.

”I have to go,” she told her, rising. “But is there anything else I can do for you, short of fixing a map?”

Nerdanel shrugged. “I was looking for Fëanáro,” she said. “Not very hard. He was supposed to meet me near the fishmongers, but I assume he got distracted by something shiny—shinier than fish guts. I don’t suppose you’ve seen him?”

“No, I haven’t. Check Varda’s pockets?”

They exchanged friendly looks in place of actual laughter. It was obvious Nerdanel believed her; Nerwen had spoken with confident ignorance. Nerdanel raised the wretched seabird to one eye in a prosthetic wink. She tilted it attentively, till light dug a winged hole.

“Lovely,” said Nerwen. “A sculpture of circumstance.” She went out again through the alley—light narrowing and belling.

*

But what had Fëanáro said to her? It seemed close to insignificant now.

He had not mentioned her father, or the leadership of the Noldor, or duty. He had asked for a lock of her hair.

It was not the first time. First had been at Olwë’s feast, when he was drunk to the point of occasional conversational pauses, and she was cold and puffed-up with success from flirting scientifically with Falmari boys. He had shouted the question to her in front of everyone, promising fame, her own palantír, and probable health benefits, and she had picked up a fistful of rough gray quartz from the jewel-strewn beach and pelted him. To general laughter. He had seemed not to feel the blows. She hadn't thrown hard.

The second time, he cornered her in the palace library, and didn't remember that he'd asked her it before. “So you see I’m serious,” he said, when she told him. He would have snared her there awhile, talking urgently about nothing she understood; then his father had come in, he had been somehow embarrassed… Finwë would have been pleased to see his son in close conference with anything fair-haired. He made her stay for lunch, and when, escaping, she had whispered “ _No_ ” in Fëanáro’s ear, Fëanáro had regarded her with the dark vague eyes of one too freshly parented to hear.

Then there was this. It had stopped raining. She had drawn off her hood, let out the prickly mass of curls: that was when he saw her, as she must have been, a dry spot in a polished world. Where the glaze ran out. Also a knot of color, under combed translucent clouds.

“Artanis!” he called gladly—he did not even have to walk up to her, chance had put him in her way. Leaning against the lip of a fountain, he trailed one hand through the water; he spoke as if they had agreed to meet.

One strand, he said. No more.

She asked him: “What would you do with it?”

He said, “I would trap it in crystal, and see what could be learned.”

Throughout it he was cordial, as one who knows himself restrained. She could think of nothing to say. “I don’t want to,” she told him, finally, rocking back on her heel; he gave her an uncomprehending nod, as of encouragement. “No,” she said, “for the last time, it’s not for you, I will not give it to you.” He raised one hand, too close, a star to her eye; she took five steps back and raised her chin. “There’s something on your heart.”

“What?” said Fëanáro.

“A shadow,” she said, running.

He didn't chase her. He repeated her name, laughing, and when she looked back it was as _though_ he had run, because the distance between them was the same. His open mouth a red smear in the Mingling, light which made air and street one precious stone. She turned a corner and vanished herself, temporarily. It was no long lack. Above her there ran narrow lanes of sky, which would lead her anywhere, though they were constricted. A fraction of freedom was freedom. Her people: building up.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] Sad in the fruit, bright in the flower](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10535415) by [Chestnut_filly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chestnut_filly/pseuds/Chestnut_filly)




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